Ethel Smyth

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Standard Name: Smyth, Ethel
Birth Name: Ethel Mary Smyth
All of ES 's writings are richly autobiographical. They provide an acute and open account of her experience as a woman entering a strictly delimited male field (in her case that of composing large-scale musical works). Her friend Vita Sackville-West somewhat waspishly suggested that ESmight concisely have entitled her successive books ME ONE, ME TWO, ME THREE, and so on.
St John, Christopher. Ethel Smyth. Longmans, Green.
246
As a passionate suffragist, ES wrote to show how these wretched sex-considerations were really the fashioning factor of my life.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
In particular, her work supports women in music, expresses her own frustrations with exclusion from English musical life, and analyses the complex of public interest, middlemen, and other conditions that I call the Machine.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Black and white photograph of Ethel Smyth, shown from the shoulders up. She is wearing a tweed suit jacket with a white shirt underneath and a tie. Her dark is pulled into a bun on the top of her head.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Marghanita Laski
The political theorist Harold Laski was ML 's uncle. Laski, a professor at the London School of Economics, was the best-known socialist intellectual of his era. His books on the Second World War, the...
Literary responses Winifred Holtby
South Riding was enormously successful. It was chosen by the Book Society as their Book of the Month for March, and sold 25,000 copies within the first three weeks of its publication. In 1937 it...
Anthologization Nina Hamnett
In the same year that she published her first book, NH also contributed an essay, What I Wore in the Nineties, to a book of childhood reminiscences compiled by Ethel Smyth and entitled Little...
Textual Production Cicely Hamilton
CH wrote the words for Ethel Smyth 's suffrage anthem, The March of the Women.
Whitelaw, Lis. The Life and Rebellious Times of Cicely Hamilton. Women’s Press.
122
Literary responses Radclyffe Hall
A number of writers rallied in support of RH . E. M. Forster and Leonard Woolf drafted a letter protesting the suppression of The Well of Loneliness. Its signatories included Bernard Shaw , T. S. Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence Evelyn Glover
As the play opens, Miss Appleyard believes that she sympathises with the anti cause and casually dismisses the dreadful Suffragists
Glover, Evelyn. “Miss Appleyard’s Awakening”. How the Vote Was Won: and Other Suffragette Plays, edited by Dale Spender and Carole Hayman, Methuen, pp. 115-24.
117
and their desire to involve themselves in politics. But a visit from Mrs Crabtree...
Family and Intimate relationships Dorothy Bussy
Dorothy's immediate family was large and vibrant: she had nine surviving siblings, most of whom distinguished themselves in the public realm. Her sister Philippa (Pippa) Strachey (1872-1968) was a longtime suffragist who organized the first...
Textual Production Inez Bensusan
This protest was one of many forms of resistance the WSPU advocated in order to put pressure on the government to give women the vote. Women were also encouraged to withhold their taxes. Leaders of...
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
Not surprisingly, the article came under attack from many directions. Dame Ethel Smyth responded in the next issue of the Sunday Times: It surprises me that so brilliant an intelligence should not remember that...

Timeline

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Texts

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